JPMorgan Chase, San Antonio, Texas
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The Amend Group was selected to provide real estate services, land brokerage, land development, campus master planning, architectural and interior design, and manage the construction process of a new office campus to house JPMorgan Chase Credit Card Services in San Antonio, Texas. The 35-acre site will ultimately hold 300,000 square feet of space provided in two, three-story office buildings clustered around a natural meadow and joined together by a sculptural pedestrian bridge. The campus has been designed to integrate with, and to preserve, the existing natural features of the rugged Texas Hill Country. Campus support amenities, included in the Phase 1 Building, include a 150–seat cafeteria, fitness center, informal meeting areas, back up daycare, and training classrooms. The resulting facility is a tri-level, 152,000sf operations center with applied structural steel that creates a pragmatic architectural vocabulary appropriate to its South Texas surroundings. 900 surface parking spaces are provided to meet the needs of Chases employees. Phase Two will provide 152,000 square feet and approximately 1000 parking spaces. Phase Two is currently under construction with completion scheduled for March 2003.
The client’s program required highly flexible and efficient work spaces. The operational groups are housed in modular furniture systems that adhere to a limited number of uniform workstation sizes. The uniformity of workstations will allow greater flexibility for future restacking of departments or rearranging groups. To reduce the scale of the work areas to more definable neighborhoods, the floor was divided into four open office areas. Common support facilities separate the work areas. Restrooms, stairs, mechanical spaces, and communications areas are distributed into each wing of the facility. The stairs were designed to encourage the employees to use the stairs for floor–to–floor traffic.
Exposed structural steel sills, applied beams, and flying steel beam buttresses were used to enliven exterior architecture. The exterior of the facility was designed with a variety of materials including brick, architectural metal panels and glass curtain walls.
The existing facility and the second building are joined together by a sculptural, curving pedestrian bridge. The steel structured bridge spans an existing flood plain and curves around an existing grove of live oak trees. The flood plain is being developed as a site amenity. The meadow landscaping will feature native meadow grasses and will preserve the existing trees and native vegetation. The meadow will be lined with patios, walking paths, the daycare playground, and smoking areas for the employees.
Project Team:
- Owner: JPMorgan Chase
- Design Architect: The Amend Group
- Architect of Record: BOKA Powell Architects
- Interior Design: The Amend Group
- Structural: Brockett-Davis-Drake
- Civil Engineers: Pape-Dawson Engineers
- MEP Engineers: ccrd Partners
- Landscape Architects: SWA Group
- General Contractor-Phase 1: Manhattan Construction Company
- General Contractor-Phase 2: Constructors
- Construction Management: The Amend Group